Free How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay by Julia Álvarez

admits.
    “Neither have I,” José adds, “and I live in the city!”
    “I’ve seen one!” Juanita speaks up, showing off
    “Where?” Miguel challenges.
    “In my imagination,” She grins.
    Miguel has been trying to imitate Tía Lola, looking for the best in people. He stares straight into Juanita’s eyes, but all he can see is his smart-alecky little sister.
    One afternoon, soon after José has returned to the city, Miguel is coming down the stairs to join his teammates in the back field. He pauses at the landing. The large window affords a view of the surrounding farms and the quaint New England town beyond.
    A silver car Miguel doesn’t recognize is coming down the dirt road to their house-Just before arriving at the farmhouse, it turns in to an old logging road at the back of the property. Behind a clump of ash trees, the car stops and the door opens.
    Later, as he stands to bat, Miguel can make out a glint of silver among the trees. Who could it be? he wonders. He thinks of telling his mother about the stranger, but decides against it. She would probably think an escaped convict was lurking in the woods and not allow the team to practice in the back field anymore.
    The next afternoon, Miguel watches from behind the curtain as the same silver car he saw in the woods yesterday comes slowly up the drive. His friends have already left after their baseball practice, and his mother is not home from work yet. He can hear Tía Lola’s sewing machine humming away upstairs.
    “Who is it?” Juanita is standing beside him, holding on to her brother’s arm. All her smart-alecky confidence is gone.
    “I think it’s him—Colonel Charlebois,”Miguel whispers. Now that the car is so close, he can make out the old man behind the wheeL The hood has a striking ornament: a little silver batter, crouched, ready to swing-“I’m going to pretend no one is home,” Miguel adds.
    But Colonel Charlebois doesn’t come up to the door. He sits in his car, gazing up at the purple-and-white house for a few minutes, and then he drives away. Later that day, a letter appears in the mailbox. “Unless the house is back to its original white by the end of the month, you are welcome to move out.”
    “Welcome
to move out?” Miguel repeats. He wrote !BIENVENIDA! to his Tía Lola when she moved in. It doesn’t sound right to
welcome
someone to move out.
    “We’ve got three weeks to paint the house back or move,” their mother says in a teary voice at dinner. “I’m disappointed, too,” she admits to Tía Lola. After all, she really loves the new color. That flaking white paint made the place look so blah and run-down. “But still, I don’t want to have to move again,” Mami sighs.
    Tía Lola pats her niece’s hand. There is something else they can try first.
    “What’s that?” her niece asks.
    They can invite
el coronel
over on Saturday.
    “But that’s the day of our big game,” Miguel reminds his aunt. They’ll be playing against another local team from the next county over.
    Tía Lola winks. She knows.
“Pero tengo un plan.”
She has a plan. Miguel should tell his friends to come a little early so they can change.
    “Change what?” Miguel’s mother asks. “Change the color of the house?”
    Tía Lola shakes her head. Change a hard heart. She’ll need more grape juice from the store.
    The day dawns sunny and warm. The cloudless sky stretches on and on and on, endlessly blue with the glint of an airplane, like a needle sewing a tiny tear in it. Every tree seems filled to capacity with dark green rustling leaves. On the neighboring farms, the corn is as tall as the boys who play baseball in the fallow field nearby. Tía Lola’s garden looks like one of Papi’s palettes. But now, after living in the country for seven months, Miguel has his own new names for colors: zucchini green, squash yellow, chili-pepper red, raspberry crimson. The eggplants are aspurple as the newly painted house. It is the full of summer.